I, like so many on this site, are in shock. I just finished a drive so I’m not quite sure if I’m feeling some form of car sickness or just literal dizziness but either way I’m shattered. This was supposed to be a legendary election and campaign for so many reasons but it turns out that will be legendary for all the wrong reasons. I’m just astounded.
So many things went wrong this campaign. I’m happy that Hillary Clinton was our nominee. That’s not where the problems were. We were completely blindsided by a polling industry that completely missed the mark on where the electorate is. An entire generation of rural voters came out in droves to drive up Trump’s numbers in all sorts of states, from the Midwest to the Atlantic seaboard… and somehow our polling outfits missed them all; or most of them. We complain about Latinos not being sampled in polls but apparently these Trump voters weren’t sampled either. Truly an amazing thing to see now, on the final day of the campaign when there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.
And because the polling was so wrong in so many places, our own guesses about where the election and the electorate stood were completely off course. I’m still shaking my head. So many people were ridiculing Nate Silver but he was seeing a trend none of us wanted to see but just couldn’t explain it very well.
And there’s the issue of electing the first female President in our history. Apparently, huge swaths of the country weren’t ready to do that. And it wasn’t based on the issues, because this campaign was anything but based on issues. It was purely because Hillary was a woman. In fact, the backlash against a female nominee was amazingly stronger than the backlash against an African American nominee. Another forehead-smacking realization for me.
We’ve all talked about how we could harness a new coalition of voters to do better during midterm elections. But that was assuming we had enough of a voter base to win national elections. We disregarded Republicans and called them a regional party way before their time. If we cannot win this national election, with an inspiring albeit flawed candidate, and a bunch of new voters across the country, what will we do during midterm elections when Trump’s fascism lures out the backwards supporters he’s brainwashed into following him off the cliff?
Anyways, I’ll probably take some time to process this campaign and election. We all should. I’ll need to re-evaluate my sources of information. Right now, I hate pollsters lol. And then start to rebuild again. GOP in civil war? GOP crashing and falling apart? Maybe this White House win stalls that process a bit but what looked like a realignment for the Supreme Court will actually not happen, which is just terribly disappointing. The federal court system will be in shambles, or will be implanted with young, conservative judges to set us back for years to come. There was so much at stake in this election and now our progress will be gone. Obamacare may not even survive a year longer, not to mention Social Security.
Oh well, I had to post something to mark this inauspicious occasion.